Saturday, 25 October 2014

We have released the first trailer for Proun+, the biggerbetter Proun that is coming to 3DS, iOS and Android! Proun+ is being made together with Engine Software and will have six new tracks and a completely new soundtrack: more songs and all the songs have now been recorded by real musicians for a much better sound. In this trailer you can hear the new version of one of the old songs and see one of the awesome new levels in action, plus footage from some of the original tracks. I am really hyped for the return of Proun, so I hope you like it!

Saturday, 18 October 2014

While working on the visual style for my weird live performance game Cello Fortress I came up with a new technique for depth of field blur: area based depth of field blur. As far as I know this is not an existing technique so today I would like to explain how it works.

The visual style for Cello Fortress is far from finished at the moment, but I decided early on that I wanted strong depth of field blur to play a major role. I had already implemented depth of field blur for Proun (which by the way is coming to 3DS, iOS and Android soon!) and I copied that to Cello Fortress. Proun does not have blur on the foreground, so I added that and tried it in-game. The result turned out to not work at all, as you can see in this image (be sure to click the image for a larger version, since this is difficult to see in these small blog-sized images):

The problem is that with standard depth of field blur, only one specific distance to the camera is sharp. In Cello Fortress the camera looks down on the battlefield diagonally, which means that that specific distance looks like a circle. Even weirder is that the part of the screen that is closest to the camera is almost at the centre of the screen: that is the spot the camera hangs exactly above. The result is that both the edges of the screen and the centre are blurred. Of course it is totally undesired that the centre of the gameplay would be blurry.

The goal was to have strong depth of field blur as a core part of the visual style for Cello Fortress. So far we either have depth of field blur that interferes with the gameplay, or no depth of field blur at all in the foreground. We need something better:

Once I drew where I wanted blur I realised that this is a simple shape: in world space this is just a simple axis-aligned box. So I implemented a shader that calculates the strength of the depth of field blur based on its distance to that 3D box, instead of distance to the camera. The result is exactly what I was looking for:

Click for larger image.Note that the effect is exaggerated in the smaller screenshot above, the full-res version has the normal, slightly less extreme blur.

A big benefit of this technique is that tweaking it is really straightforward, and that it is independent on the camera. I can easily set the sharp area from code based on the gameplay situation. It also gives me precise control over the height at which the blur starts.

Technically area based blur is quite easy to do. The depth of field blur shader already uses a render-texture that contains the depth of each pixel to the camera. I don't use this depth for anything else, so I can put any value I like there. The pixel shader can easily be adjusted to calculate depth in a different way.

This concept can also be applied to other shapes than boxes. For example, you can also have a sphere within which everything is sharp, while everything outside that sphere is blurred. One can even have several such spheres. How about a visual style where everything is blurred except for the areas around the characters? I think some other interesting visual styles can be made this way, especially in combination with very strong blur.

I have seen some games that use non-distance based depth of field blur, like the beautiful Below, which seems to simply blur the top and bottom of the screen. I am not aware of games that use a 3D area as I use it. Let me know if there are other games that already do this.

The fun of writing your own shaders is that you can bend them to do whatever you want, including weird and unrealistic effects like doing my depth of field blur based on a 3D box area. Feel free to use this idea in your own games, and I'd love to hear from you if try it out!

Sunday, 12 October 2014

Last week I wrote a blogpost about how we think it is better to have a bigger patch once every one or two months than to have really small weekly patches. I was curious what other developers' experiences with this are, so I asked around for more opinions on this. Since patching on console and mobile is so different I looked for developers who have a game on Steam, which is the platform that enables regular patching best.

Someone also pointed me to the Valve talk where they explained the importance of communication around patches and how this helped them grow Team Fortress 2. This is an incredibly interesting talk, so be sure to check it out:

"While I have lots of opinions, I think it comes down to "it depends". Personally I think many devs try to do it the Valve Way only to find they don't really, truly understand why it works for Valve."

Mark Morris from Introversion
developer of Prison Architect (currently in Early Access)

"I guess the update frequency is linked quite closely to the style of development. For us, we wanted to produce quite meaty chunks (the hope being that we would get press coverage for individual updates). A month gave us enough time to develop decent additions, but was at a frequency that would still be engaging for the players. I could see weekly working, but I think that each update would be a lot less polished and would have a much more iterative development feel about it."

"I think it would also depend on the game. For us in Early Access, we are one of those who patch every week or 2 weeks. Our game is a different spectrum compared to ones with stories, weapons, & what not. So patching each week works well for us. We're only doing this for Early Access though or for "bigger" updates, we'll spread it out a bit, like when we add in Oculus Rift or some of our other bigger stretch goals. Once we are out of Early Access, then we'll spread our updates out every month or so."

"There's only two of us and we work well putting out our patches each week, because it's usually about tweaking things, fixing bugs and implementing a feature. TTS is more for people to create their own games, so for us, it's better to get things out to help our users out more. Once we feel TTS is at the point where the community has the tools they need to create their own games to their fullest abilities, then we'd go out of Early Access and we wouldn't need to update every week anymore. But my point is, is that we'll still update after Early Access, but we won't have that greater need to do it each week like we do now, because it's at that "completed" stage and we'd focus on the bigger picture of adding in the bigger things from our Kickstarter stretch goals, and find ways to improve it in general."

"I think we probably spoiled our community because of our weekly updates and who knows what the uproar will be if we switch to monthly, but it's probably something we'd do gradually and we'd let our community know since we're pretty transparent. [...] As long as we keep our community in the loop, that's most important."

Pete Angstadt from Turtle Sandbox
developer of Cannon Brawl (recently released out of Early Access)

"I think the regularity of update scheduling, whether it's a week or a month is probably the most important part. That and communicating the schedule to your audience. [...] Vlambeer has a weekly schedule which they communicate to players with their livestream. Other games I think have done 'in-game' countdown timers to the next patch, or at least had the latest patch notes visible in game. If we had to do it over again, I would have gone with a very regular monthly patching schedule and included patch notes in game."

Roel Ezendam from Ragesquid
developer of Action Henk (currently in Early Access)

"We recently switched from bi-weekly to monthly updates for our Early Access game Action Henk. The biggest improvement that we have noticed is that we have far less overhead that's being spent on finishing and releasing the update. With a short update cycle the game constantly needs to be in a stable state, which makes it harder to work on larger features or a big overhaul. It also just takes time to publish the update and check if everything is working properly. These bi-weekly updates basically put us in a constant state of crunch, whereas the monthly updates give us a bit more breathing room."

"We've found that patching often isn't a bad thing if supporting your core community members (in effort to expand your core community) is your aim. [...] Anyway, I agree that this isn't a solid way to market the game in the main, but that's where our larger, more content-focused updates and DLC releases come in. I've found you can't tap the well too many times no matter how you slice it (unless you're in that fortunate position to have a sizable audience just begging for more) as far as reaching out to new players -- but a consistent stream of smaller updates keeps the community you already have established active and growing. That said, we do find that even our most popular games occasionally hit periods of patch ennui for both our community and our development team. :)"

Josef Vorbeck from Chasing Carrots
developer of Cosmonautica (currently in Early Access)

"We update Cosmonautica in 2 week cycles. We even did this before Early Access, because it's our standard rhythm with two week sprints. And we think, that we can deliver enough in two weeks to make these updates meaningful. Also we think that it's crucial for an Early Access title, that the players see constant progress during the development. These days Early Access has a mediocre reputation, because some devs are leaving their games or decide their games are finished, even though more features were planned. With our update cycles and constant communication we're trying to earn the trust of the players. It just works for us, the response so far is really great. And of course it's important for us to get the valuable feedback from our players on a regular basis. But after our final release we might switch our update rhythm to aim for larger content updates which deliver their own story, as Joost stated."

While digging for opinions I also got a replay on Gamedev.net from a user named Orymus3 who wrote a really interesting remark on the term "patch" itself:

"I would avoid using the term 'patch'. To most people this suggests you are fixing bugs, which also infers you develop bugs. What you really want to put forward is the fact you're actively working in the game, and are releasing new content. 'Content Push', 'Release', etc. are all better terms to refer to what you're doing. This may not appear like much, but imagine that a player comes across a post about your game (it's the only thing he's ever seen) and he sees 'Patch'. He's likely to think: here's another incomplete Beta filled with bugs, I'll give this a pass."

Sunday, 5 October 2014

Recently I have seen quite a few games that launched with the plan to patch really often, especially Early Access games. Most of those games patch once a week or once every two weeks. This may seem like a good idea: iterate quickly and show clearly to the user that you really do the best you can to make good on the promise of improving the game. For a time with Awesomenauts we also tried to patch as often as possible, but by now we think that is actually a bad idea.

The main reason for this is that the more often you patch, the smaller the patches are. Lots of small patches means lots of hardly noticeable changes to the game. Why would a user come back to your game because of 5 balance tweaks, 3 bug fixes and improved graphics for 2 weapons? Why would a regular player be exited about this? The changes done in weekly patches are just too small to make an impact.

Combining a bunch of those smaller patches together creates something much more noteworthy. In a bigger patch once every one or two months you could overhaul the graphics of all the weapons instead of just two, do dozens of balance tweaks and fix a ton of bugs. Simply combining all the changes from a bunch of micro-patches into one bigger patch turns it from a bunch of uninteresting patches to one exciting patch that really improves the game significantly.

An important note here is that I am NOT suggesting that development should be slowed down. On the contrary: keep improving and extending that game as much as you can, just like we try to do with Awesomenauts! I am only suggesting to group the changes and release them together.

The goal of doing a games-as-a-service model where you are constantly improving the game is not only to improve the game, but also to excite the players. Keep them playing longer, bring back players who stopped playing and get new players. To excite players you need stories. Not literal stories, but things that players can discuss with their friends. Bigger patches are much more interesting to talk about.

Having bigger patches also allows you to create new 'stories' without additional development. You can give a patch a name and a theme simply by looking at the changes and finding some similarities. This way you can create a new story for the patch itself and make it feel like a big event.

Since December we have been doing active marketing for each Awesomenauts patch. We announce a patch beforehand and slowly reveal information about it. We have made a special website for this: Voltar's Vault.

A couple of weeks before a patch comes we open the Vault. At that moment it contains only locks. Then in the weeks up to the patch we gradually release more info on what is going to be in it. Usually we first give a vague hint, then a couple of days later we announce what it really is. This pushes anticipation for our patches enormously. Our community creates a Vault topic on our forum for every patch and posts hundreds of pages of discussion there, as you can see in this topic for patch 2.7. The more interesting the features are and the more suggestive (but cryptic!) the hints are, the crazier it gets.

The result is that we can create crazy hype for every patch and get big peaks in our playerbase whenever we release a patch. The day a patch launches we have twice as many players as on a normal day. Sometimes we can even create significant sales bumps ourselves. Those are small compared to the bump of a Steam sale, but Steam sales require getting lucky with Valve to get a slot. We can create sales peaks through hyped patches ourselves.

By increasing the size of the patch and adding a name, theme, Vault website and hints we can create real stories, worthy of discussing with your friends. In some cases even worthy to be picked up by press: a couple of big news websites (including Destructoid) often write about our patches. This only works because there is enough time in between patches to actually hype them, and because patches are big enough to make this worthwhile.

Note that if you look at our patch notes you might get a different impression. We do many more patches than I describe here. The reason for this is that we distinguish between major patches and hotfixes. A hotfix is a small patch that only fixes some immediate issues. Obvious bugs or even crashes should not be left in the game for a month, so we don't bunch up fixes for game breaking issues. Hotfixes generally don't add anything new: they just fix a broken game experience.

We started bunching features into bigger patches after we heard about how Valve went the same road with Team Fortress 2. Apparently they did weekly patches for quite a while, sometimes doing even two patches a week. They claim to have much more success with the patches since they bunch them up and give them a name and a theme. I tried finding the article where I read this but couldn't find it. Regardless, have a look at Team Fortress 2's patching history and you will see that Valve creates big patches with some time between (plus apparently a lot of small tweaking patches).

So far this post has mostly been about marketing. There is of course also a practical side to patching and continuous development. When we want to do big changes or add complex new features to Awesomenauts we need time to balance and tweak those. A big portion of that is done through semi-public betas on Steam. When we add a new character we need several weeks of beta to get his balance right for launch. This workflow is not very compatible with weekly patches.

Also, focussing on having something new ready every week probably requires incredibly short and focussed development cycles. This might sound good but I doubt production can be this focussed permanently for a year or more without burning developers out. Doing weekly patches requires really good management to keep it going and likely adds constant pressure on the dev team.

In the end patches are also a form of marketing: they need to create stories. Not literal stories, but things that are worthwhile to talk about. Things that press can pick up on, things that players can discuss.